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Hanyou

didn't build that
Alright, I'm intrigued. Can you name a mainstream movie that has this sort of "pointlessness?"

Mine would be Alien, which isn't only my favorite horror film, but honestly one of my favorite movies of all time. The first half is loaded with irrelevant dialog that serves to build the world and the characters. It's fantastic film making, and a testament to Ridley Scott and the rest of the cast and crew that they managed to pull it off at all. Its sequel, Aliens, is very Cameron-esque in its focus on relevant information and a forward-moving narrative devoid of any subtlety. As well as that works for Aliens, nothing can quite match the atmosphere of the original.

Tarantino and Lynch are obvious directors to namedrop. They make this sort of thing work.

A negative example would be Melancholia. I actually love the dark atmosphere the movie creates. Its opening is poetry, and the second half is very, very oppressive. However, there are 30 to 45 minutes of character-building that are simply not relevant to the movie, and in my opinion, it weakens what could have been a strong picture. Then again, this is Lars von Trier we're talking about, so he's probably not trying to appeal to anyone but himself.

On the other hand, you have Star Wars. Those are mainstream action films meant to have wide appeal, so too much intentionally pointless dialog would be crippling (I hear the original cut of the first movie was loaded with it, but I love the '77 release for how lean it is). I'd say The Empire Strikes Back has the best writing of the movies, as not one moment is irrelevant. Same with other late 70s/80s mainstream films like Back to the Future, Indiana Jones, The Terminator, RoboCop, etc. These show the merits of a focused script.

I guess the real question is whether the irrelevancy has a purpose, as counter-intuitive as that may seem. In a tight action film like Star Wars or the already-long Lord of the Rings, you want to limit irrelevant information. On the other hand, there's the Lord of the Rings extended cut, particularly of The Two Towers, which offers a tiny bit of meaningless stuff that serves to make the world and characters feel fleshed-out. For the record, while I like The Hobbit, I think one of its weaknesses is its awful lack of focus, a result of trying to shoehorn in "prequel" elements to a story that worked just fine as a focused children's book. So again, pointlessness (in context of The Hobbit's story) weakens the script.

I'd like to point out that shows have a similar thing going. I'm going to name two of my favorites--Breaking Bad and Avatar: The Last Airbender. Virtually nothing in these shows exists without a purpose, but it comes together well, and the shows rarely feel less than organic. Besides, with Breaking Bad, the creator was trying to build a very distinct vision of a moral universe, so too much irrelevant information would have weighed things down. I prefer that to, say, Lost, where half the stuff that happens is meaningless.

That said, Cowboy Bebop is another one of my favorite shows, and one of the things that distinguishes it is the fact that more than half of what happens is entirely irrelevant to the main story. Waltz for Venus, for instance, is easily one of the best episodes, but it's self-contained. Nothing comes back, as far as I'm aware. It has no real implications for the universe as a whole. But it is beautiful on its own, arguably just as strong as the show's overall plot. Now, there isn't a lot of irrelevant dialog in any given episode, but I do think in a television show, this serves a similar purpose to what an idle exchange in a movie might offer.

So. Alien, Eraserhead, Pulp Fiction, and Cowboy Bebop show that meaninglessness can work just fine. Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Breaking Bad, and other popular entertainment shows that giving everything a purpose works, too. What it comes down to is whether it serves the movie/show/book as art--whether the meaninglessness actually serves some purpose (like world-building, atmosphere, etc.) or it's simply a matter of sloppy writing or poor execution.

I will add that while I haven't seen Man of Steel, I've yet to see a superhero film that doesn't feel contrived. That's not necessarily a terrible thing, but even Nolan's much-praised Dark Knight trilogy is incredibly transparent and hardly organic. As popular entertainment, it's fine, but I'm not sure how something like Man of Steel even could function with irrelevant data dropped into the script.
 

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